Goodbye Le Guin

Right before Christmas, Publishers Weeklyreported that Ursula K. Le Guin had resigned from the Authors Guild. Le Guin, who has been a member of the Guild since 1972, was apparently not pleased with the organization’s role in the Google Book settlement. In her letter of resignation, she wrote:

You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

The Google Books Project may not be, in Le Guin’s words, “the devil,” but it is troubling for a number of reasons. Copyright is one, certainly. But as Anthony Grafton has pointed out on this blog before, the level of control Google has assumed over such a massive digital library is more worrisome in the long-term—not only because of what we are or are not allowed to see, but also because of how our physical libraries will fare, and how punctilious Google will be with its mistakes. But alarming, too, is that the Google juggernaut is making it more and more difficult for other organizations to cooperate with one another, both inside and out.

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